1 9 8 6

Richard Bruton has posted a piece about London Underground Comics. "It's the brainchild of Oli Smith, and is really the rebranding of the Camden Comics Stall." Richard compares it to the old Fast Fiction stall of the early eighties and shows a photo, see left, of me and Ed Pinsent and Peter Stanbury at the (FF) stall. Internal evidence suggests that the location is UKCAC (United Kingdom Comic Art Convention) in 1986, shortly after the last day in which I held down a regular nine-to-five. I don't remember that particular pic, but the style was immediately familiar to me, making it one of Phil Elliott's. He always had a roll of black and white in his camera. Here's another from perhaps April/May that year, judging from the internal evidence of wee hayley campbell's skinny legs. That's Phil and Fiona Elliott on a visit with us in Brighton and the wife of my bosom would be the one on this side of the camera.


Phil and I used to work together a lot back then, though we'd just lost our regular gig in the weekly Sounds. He drew us into his comic strips more than once, such as this little record of our visit with them in Kent.


Funny to think that back then we had no money but we don't seem to be half as concerned about the subject as we are now. Even Anne thought it was hilarious:



Phil has a great website. Go and have a look.

The sixties.

The well known exchange of dialogue from the movie Field of Dreams (1989) stuck in my mind for a long time:
Annie Kinsella:"...And if you experienced even a little bit of the sixties, you would feel the same way, too."
Beulah: [indignantly] I *experienced* the sixties.
Annie Kinsella: "No, I think you had two fifties and moved right into the seventies."

I spent the entire sixties in captivity, since the ends of the decade correspond to my ages of five and fifteen, so I guess I missed the fun part, at least in the ways that I measure fun from my present perspective. However, while I am suspicious of sentimentality for the past, It would certainly be true to say that there was something special about the sixties, from the point of view of an artist. In tandem with picking up and watching Godard's A bout de Souffle (1960) I was recently reading a book one of me pals gave me for my fiftieth birthday two years back, Revolution! :The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s, by Peter Cowie and I got to remembering how there was a time before film properties were thought of, in the terminolgy of business, as 'franchises.' That was way back when a fellow whose name I have forgotten used to take me along to seasons of Welles and Hitchcock at the National Film Theatre and I had half a notion of getting into that world, the Art of Film.

To save us all having to spend undue amounts of time excavating the ruins of that age, there's a blog doing the work for us: The World Of Kane: 'Retro candy for your eyes and ears.' It's the work of Will Kane, whose myspace shows him to be 38. His obsession with sixties is the itching, driving, all encompassing obsession of one who arrived just as they were closing the doors. Here he gives us a beautiful set of images of Vasarely's op-art paintings, and here's Sammy Davis and Anthony Newly in what looks like a Hefner setting, which is all a bit self-congratulatory and self-conscious, but I'd never seen it before, and anyway I seem to remember that being the gestalt of the sixties.

Much more precious are the three Youtube clips of Jacques Brel, a true artist who died before he was fifty.. Especially look at his 'le moribond', horribly massacred in English as the syrupy "Seasons in the Sun."
(superior direct translation of Mort Shuman)
"Goodbye Antoine, I didn't like you very much,
I am dying of dying today,
but you are full of life and more soild than boredom
...seeing that you were her lover I know that you will take care of my wife.
I want you all to laugh, all to dance, all to enjoy yourselves like crazy,
when they drop me in the hole."
and Amsterdam:
"In the port of Amsterdam there are sailors who dance,
rubbing their bellies against womens' bellies,
they turn and they dance like suns spit out,
to the sound of a rancid accordion."

Kane has been collecting the sixties since Oct 2005, so there's a lot of browsing to be done. His latest post is about comic book stylist Jim Steranko. He shows the famous censored page from SHIELD #2, but the supposed original version has always looked bogus to me, with that clunky drawing of the figures, as though Jim concocted it after the event just for a good yarn. The way it was printed looks superior to these eyes. In an earlier post Kane has scanned the whole romance story that Steranko drew.
(thanks to drjon for the link)


****
One of my regular correspondents emailed and asked me to explain the 'asscrusher' story from my Feb 11 post.

Tony Consiglio was working in an appliance store and got a phone order for an 'asscrusher' from a lady down South
The great thing about Tony's telling of the story is that he strings it out for ages and the listener can't get it, so this is the very short version:

"Lady, if you don't mind me asking, what do you need an asscrusher for?"
"Are you making a fool of me? you need an ass-crusher to crush youah ass!"

Tony keeps trying to find ways to clarify the query, until finally it clicks:

"And when you've crushed it, where do you keep your ass."
"Are you stupid, mister? You keep youah ass in the ass box to put in youah drinks."

(I've been tampering with the phonetics in the above all day...sigh...)

Happy Birthday to me Mum

She's the sweet and lovely lady behind the pram and I'm the chubby kid at the front with the complicated pants.

I read the news of the passing of Bob Callahan at the same time I was scanning the two pages (for the Alec omnibus) that were reproduced somewhat poorly (they have problematic zipatones which demand some extra time and attention) in the book he edited, The New Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Stories: From Crumb to Clowes. I quite liked Bob the first time he called me and asked to reprint a story of mine. I never got paid the reprint fee but I mentally waived that since he sent me a great bunch of photocopies of Tad Dorgan's work for a book on the great cartoonist that he was making. If it ever got published I've never been able to find it. When somebody phoned me and asked for reprint rights for a two pager in the Smithsonisn book I didn't know Bob Callahan was behind that too, otherwise I'd have asked him for my tiny wee reprint fee for the first outing way back in 1991. Sure enough I didn't get paid for this one either. So now I've been in the habit, whenever somebody rings about a reprint enquiry, I say 'Hey, Bob Callahan isn't involved in this is he? No? oh, nothing, i was just asking." I guess I don't have to ask any more. Oh well, he'd probably get a laff out of my sketch (I think Tad may have been the first to say it*, allowing for inflation):

(*afterthought, no, it was Hershfield's Abie the Agent. But Harry and Tad worked in the same artroom, so close enough)

HE'S HAVING A REST
...........................................................after............................................................

1whole year of daily blogging.

.............................................look in from time to time........................................

HAPPY 86th BIRTHDAY

to Eddie Campbell senior.

seen here in a story from 1985 long out of print.

However the words have become a catchphrase in this house and at least once a week somebody says "who's been swipin' lumps aff the cheese" in the best Scottish accent they can muster, which is usually as good as the real thing.

Well how about that!
Twenty three years married todayAnd only murdered each other twice

Bonjour to you too!

Tsecond volume of Alec in French, Graffiti Kitchen, is just out this week. Hopefully anybody likely to take offence can't read French. You can see it at left alongside the first volume. Ça et La have changed the cover since we last looked at it here. I expect they don't really want to hear who prefers the first one at this juncture, so keep it to yourself. The edition translates my Three piece Suit and it prints it very nicely. I'm working towards having all four of my autobiographical blathers in digital form. I've just sent the third, How to Be an Artist, now offically out of print in English, off to France on disc, so that's three down and one to go. When all four are done I'll be looking at putting it out a big omnibus in English through Top Shelf.
Seeing wee hayley campbell speaking French long before she knew how to:
... reminds that me she was in that lovely country around the time of my birthday and sent me a bottle of 1995 Coteaux du Layon Chaume, a grand vin d'Anjou, (11 years old? 12? living down here so long i've forgotten when we count from in the northern hemisphere), deliciously sweet. Didn't we bring that kid up right!! She included a cartoon of herself, 'french variant edition campbell with comedy beret':

review
*********
Nicki Greenberg puts on a slide show at Avid Reader while in town on other business- finds herself a victim of the sort of mishap that happens to me regularly.
***********
Actress (I know we say 'actor' these days for the ladies but...) Deborah Kerr died this week, age i think 86. The bloke on breakfast tv reminded me of one of the great lines of all time:

"When you speak of this, and you will, please be kind."

Spoken by Deboorah Kerr in the movie version of Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy. (1956)
Controversial play about the difficult coming-of-age of a boy who is scorned by his peers for being "unmasculine," and the efforts of a sympathetic older woman to help him overcome his self-loathing. The movie version dilutes the effect, despite some excellent performances.

happy birthday to ME

For I'm a felly good jollo (52). Seeing my call for a photo or two of me and wee Cal in San Diego last week, as we came home without any, Andy Runton of Owly fame emailed a couple. After my rictus grin on the front of PW Comics Week, which you may have missed as I didn't draw attention to it, I have resolved to smile no more for the birdy, any birdy.


*********
In preparation for meeting him at the Brisbane Writers festival next month, I'm reading Guy Delisle's excellent Shenzhen; a travelogue from China , in which I have come across this interesting use of the forbidden technique of crossed balloon tails.


I say interesting because I myself have just been caught red-handed by the calligrapher supreme Todd Klein, in his review of The Black Diamond Detective Agency. While otherwise praising me, he writes: Occasionally the white brush-stroke tails cross, as in the panel (below), which is further confused by criss-crossing white bullet-trails. This violates so many things about good lettering that I hardly know where to start!


I really did think hard about whether the world would let me get away with that one. As I caught my two comedic characters in a chaotic crossfire, running around in my noodle was the famous snatch of dialogue from the Ghostbusters movie:

Dr. Egon Spengler: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don't cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

Go out and get your bawbaw.

Happy Seventeenth Birthday to Erin Campbell!
you may remember her from such comicals as "This is your lunch'
(enlarge each tier separately)
(From The Dance of Lifey death in Three Piece Suit.)
************
Meanwhile, "It's a pain in the gary," said the other one, wee hayley campbell (who took the photograph above), at the beginning of a conversation that had me phoning our local chirpy cockney, mr White, and ended with me finding the cover of this week's London Time Out magazine. Soon as I set me minces on this I said, 'very From 'ell, dontcher fink?'
************
In other news:
Drunk takes a free bike ride on car roof-
Jul 3, "The driver and his wife, when stopped by the police, said they heard a noise while waiting at a traffic light, but did not realize they were taking on an extra passenger."

This is your Life.

H ayley Campbell is twenty-one today.
Having an autobiographical cartoonist for one's pa may not turn out to be a good thing in the long run, so here we go with the customary embarrassing stuff, starting with her potty training, as depicted in little italy (birthday or no, I've still got to push these books.)


"They spent the night in a crockery jar
and each of them thought
'How wise we are'..."

Her fascination with the the things that live under rocks started early.

Speaking of beasties, she was the first to see the Snooter flying in. (Tell them it had a long curly proboscis. They never believed me.)


Studying languages:

Visiting Hollywood:

These were the angry years:


But it all turned out as well as could be expected. This is the latest photo of the lass, in Paris this year, as provided by Nathalie, regular visitor to this blog. (Hope you don't mind me using it here... thanks in advance).



panel 1 from Doggie in the Window (1986) collected The King canute Crowd, 2 and 3 from Little Italy (drawn 1987, collected 1991), 4 and 5 from The Dance of Lifey Death (1993)... these last two books are now in Three Piece Suit, 6-9 are in After the Snooter ( drawn 1995-2002) and 10 is 'Angry Cook' from The Fate of the Artist (2006). Fate is from First Second. Top Shelf has that and all the others. The line of verse is from my rendition the Jumblies by Edward Lear.

"I am not a whole-souled admirer of womankind, as you are aware, Watson, but..."

H appy Birthday to the wife of my bosom. The above was taken shortly after Anne and I met twenty five years ago.

"Exactly. She does not shine as a wife even in her own account of what occurred. I am not a whole-souled admirer of womankind, as you are aware, Watson, but my experience of life has taught me that there are few wives having any regard for their husbands who would let any man's spoken word stand between them and that husband's dead body. Should I ever marry, Watson, I should hope to inspire my wife with some feeling which would prevent her from being walked off by a housekeeper when my corpse was lying within a few yards of her."
- Sherlock Holmes in The Valley of Fear

(it's the only quote I can find that isn't soppy.)

waitaminnit, it's the phone.
Hi, Honeybee. Eh? You expected something more heartfelt?
hey, i thought you couldn't access the net at work!
Wha? You'll deal with me when you get home? okay, darlyboos. I'm looking forward to it.
And thanks for roning.
oh dear.
hmm.. let's move some of these blunt objects out of here....

Actually, that's just wishful thinking on my part; she's treating herself to an afternnoon at the five star spa, and getting one of those 'big kahuna' massages. That's where the guy drowns you in unguents, pummels you to within an inch of your life and then grabs, as the wife put it, 'big armfuls of bum.' The previous time she had one of those she came out of it in a state of amnesia and wandered around blankly for the rest of the evening until somebody got her address out of her purse and put her in a taxi.

I shall await anxiously on the veranda.
&hearts

Wee Cal

I t's the lad's 15th birthday and as of today he is officially taller than I am at 6 ft 2 ins. This will come as a shock to those of you who still picture him as the wee nyaff in After the Snooter (above).

The ID card at left is newly minted. He was telling me at dinner last night that the five guys in front of him all borrowed the new kid's Harry Potter glasses and greased their hair back for their photos until the photographer twigged to what was going on and started doing his pieces. He grabbed the last one still wearing the borrowed specs, marched him to the class teacher and asked her if he was legit. The teacher, half paying attention said she didn't recognize him so he must be the new kid.
Oh to be fifteen again.

Well, rather you than me.

(ps slipping into anecdotal mode I found myself using the phrase 'doing his pieces' above, which is not a wee Cal phrase, in fact I was astonished to find that nobody else in the house knows it, and I had to rummage to find an online definition for those of you who will be confused. But it is a phrase i think worth preserving so i stuck with it. 'Nyaff' you can take or leave. See links )

and if you don't have After the Snooter, here's how the story finished:

"Bewerr from de Hides from Motch!"

Happy birthday to my fellow artist, John Coulthart, who mentioned that it falls upon this day, the ides of march, in comments when I quoted a passage from Milt Gross' version of Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar a few weeks back. Or to be more precise: "How It Got Bomped Huff Julius Sizzer. Pot Two"
***
Speaking of mangling the English language, Google translation should be a literary genre in its own right. Here is a blogger's review of the Spanish version of The Birth Caul, my collaboration with Alan Moore, which can be found in English in A Disease of Language.
"The fault, in any case, corresponds to Eddie Campbell to him, who is who carried out the adaptations, but even so I do not resist to the temptation to give a good pull him of ears perhaps (better I occur it in the beards) to the own Moore by its conception of the writing, that in my opinion derives with too much frequency in the solipsismo. It can that stops he have sense all and each one of the images that propose, but the certain thing are that of as much rhetoric the total understanding takes control very complicated of its speech.
Yet, I have left the sensation of which, in spite of its points in common with Serpents and stairs, as it can be that vision between scientist, poetic mystic and of the human life - in addition to the illustrations of the own Campbell-, The Birth Caul is quite inferior to that. And it is it, at least in me opinion, indeed and mainly by these same verbal excesses. As much that the work remains in a pile of dark vaguedades of which with great difficulty some sense can be intuited. And although outside that indeed what Moore tried to do, the certain thing possibly is that for me the Native Amnion continues being a sovereign stupidity that bores to the ewes."
For all I know, the translation of Alan Moore in the book itself was as good as this.
***
And while the translating nodule in your brain is stimulated, let us continue. I don't know whether there's any truth in the story that, during his several days of torture, they held Guy Fawkes against the bell of Big Ben wherewith the hammer for to hitte him, but it was good enough to steal. So in the Batman book by me and my pal White, Batman: the Order of Beasts, which takes place in London in 1939, we built up the business of Cockney rhyming slang through the story. eg. 'I delayed wrapping the body so you'd get a butcher's at the coins beside the head..." "butcher's?' "Butcher's hook=look.' (traditional london slang) 'ah, I think I'm getting th hang of this rhyming slang'. Thus at the climax when the poor bloke tied to the bell shouts 'Elp, Batman, it's goin' to hit me in the niagaras!!' (our own invention) the readers, including Americans, would immediately get the meaning. But we didn't count on the inhabitants of the DC universe not having testicles, so we had to change it to a loaf of bread.
*****
My pal bob Morales sent this link to an article in the Toronto Star: a professor of Hellenistic history gives his thoughts on 300. Well, no surprise to know it's all very inaccurate, but here is the blow by blow account.
"And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia."
"This moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes in Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang."

I can feel one a them 'I-can't-stop-giggling' fits coming on. The mighty Spurge gives us another 300 link:
* Iranian movie critics are upset about lack of character development and liberal use of slow-motion in movie version of the comic. Okay, not exactly."
So you click on the link and find yourself at the New York Post.
IRAN BLASTS '300' DECLARES WAR ON HOLLYWOOD EPIC.
"The movie "300," which earned a huge $70 million in its opening U.S. weekend, is "cultural and psychological warfare," the Tehran government declared."
"Iranians, including thousands who signed an online petition denouncing the film, say it portrays their ancient forbears as crazed monsters led by an effeminate emperor, Xerxes, who is outfought by heroic Greeks in the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C."
"Hollywood declares war on Iranians," read a headline in the moderate newspaper Ayandeh-No.
A front-page article charged that the film spreads the lie that Iran "has long been the source of evil, and modern Iran's ancestors are the ugly murderous savages you see in '300.' "
Pirated copies of the film are the talk of Tehran. "
It'll be the Danish cartoons all over again!

Some geezer reported by the NY Times sees it as a critique of the Bush administration.
“Is George Bush Leonidas or Xerxes?” one of them asked.
The questioner, by Mr. Snyder’s recollection, insisted that Mr. Bush was Xerxes, the Persian emperor who led his force against Greek’s city states in 480 B.C., unleashing an army on a small country guarded by fanatical guerilla fighters so he could finish a job his father had left undone."
hoohah, lordy... bring on the next one... Frank Miller as cliche Bond villain. Upsets both sides, occasioning the outbreak of World War 3. When it's all done, steps in and takes over.

But what about the Gecko Emperor?
******

wee hayley campbell should post more often.
she makes me larf.

50

I managed to extricate myself from the boozy proceedings at a reasonable hour last night and so I was not there to see the young future husband lying in the gutter with his whole life before him and, in closer proximity, his dinner.

And since I wrote that before I got there, it may well have ended differently.

FIFTY! My fiftieth day of continuous posting. I am reminded of another boozy night, my fiftieth birthday bash, which took place about eighteen months ago. The photos were coming out looking all wrong, all cold and harsh, until I turned off the flash. With the longer shutter speed everything's looking a bit out of focus now, which is kind of the way I remember it anyway, and the colours are all rich and fruity, except I don't recall my pal Mullins having a purple head on the night.



For anybody interested in the characters in my personal sitcom here at Campbell-blogspot, that's mr j and Hayley Campbell at extreme right, Chalky White in the red shirt and I'm at the back acting like I just scored a goal by getting to the night's end without anybody falling out. I can't see my pal Best in among this colourful flurry. Perhaps he succeeded in 'extricating himself from the boozy proceedings at a reasonable hour', but a memorable moment in the evening was the halting of all eating and drinking so that we could listen to his singing of Meet me in the Alley MacGarry, complete with new verses written by him specially for the occasion, with me leading the chorus. This, you probably forget, was the song that the three tenors were supposed to be singing in our photo hoax in Bacchus #20, which is to be rendered as an 1890s type of waltz. Minty Moore and White, who wrote it (and were the other two tenors in this ridiculous display), had a different conception of the 3/4 time, so when I sing it (as I still do occasionally in the shower) I have to omit and add syllables here and there.


(click to enlarge if you want to read it. If you want to sing it, I'm afraid you'll have to improvise)

If you're new here and don't know who Alec Macgarry is, look here, where a wonderful fellow named Guido Weisshahn has catalogued all my books and the chapters in them, showing where everything has ever appeared. I have never thanked him enough, perhaps from a fear that acknowledging having looked at his impeccably detailed pages might in itself be an act of egotism. If I ever make it to Dresden I will Take Guido and his family out for a slap-up dinner.

And you can buy here, at Top Shelf where the Alec books are still in print.

And finally, a picture of me and the wife of my bosom from the same night. I seem to have lost my glasses, which I daresay is why everything was out of focus.